Alasdair Gray - A History Maker

CHAPTER TWO — PRIVATE HOUSES

Page 24.

A stately woman of fifty was mother that day .

Every home had at least six experienced women who could order the powerplant and who did the job by turns, a week at a time. During that week whoever did the job was regarded as mother of the whole household. It was hard work so no younger women wanted so stern a title. Besides, many girls bore children when too young to patiently nurse them. In modern homes no infant was in danger of neglect. Most attached themselves to an aunt (the title given to any childbearing woman over eighteen) or granny (a title given to all women past childbearing).

Page 25.

Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day .

The organ could draw from the powerplant every recorded form of music, art and industry less than the diameter of the stalk. All housemothers were skilled musicians since anyone who could play Bach’s Mass circa 1740 easily managed the fingering which summoned the components of a Triumph motor cycle circa 1956. No skill in fingering was needed to make simple substances like chocolate or dynamite, though for health reasons organists kept this knowledge from children. (Note: the noise, stink and danger of the oil-fired Triumph made many adolescent youths prefer it to the safer, cleaner, more efficient models of the twenty-first century.)

Elastoplast

Trade name of an antiseptic adhesive bandage first manufactured in the early twentieth century.

Page 25.

The cooks [ordered] milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans.

The extra fertilizing of the powerplants’ roots after large funerals let them deliver meat with unusual speed. Most families avoided the taint of cannibalism by being vegetarian for a fortnight unless hunters brought in game from the commons.

Page 26.

Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty.

Granny Tibs was not an immortal. Her age (like the greater average height) had grown naturally with modern housekeeping, which used the elderly with affection and respect. The link between long lives and respect for them was first discovered by a joint team of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. scientists who visited the Russian Caucasus in the late twentieth century, investigating rumours of unusual longevity there. They found the rumours true, and that the longevity had little to do with diet and climate. Their discovery was tersely summed up by the Anglo-American Alistair Cooke who said, “If you want to live a long time teach your children to love you, and your grandchildren to revere you.”

Page 29.

A marble bird-table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier.

This must have been derived from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s pond sculpture in the garden of Little Sparta, near Biggar in Lanarkshire.

Page 30.

A fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house.

Powerplants could synthesize any form of healthy nourishment but food connoisseurs believed that synthesized foods more elaborate than maize, rice or cornflour lacked the flavour of natural growth, were as tasteless as the food in days when vegetables and livestock had their growth forced by factory farming and genetic engineering, their decay retarded by freezing, atomic radiation and chemical additions. Apart from grain crops the foods ordered from the powerplant were those which could not be grown locally such as tea, coffee, sugar, oranges and lemons in northern Europe. All modern households had large kitchen gardens. Berrying, nutting and mushroom picking on the commons were popular seasonal pastimes, hunting and fishing were popular sports. The increasing popularity of these activities during the last days of the early matriarchy were among the factors which helped humanity survive the great plague with so little loss of life.

Page 30.

On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife.

In northern Europe the henwife of large households had a status which gave her a place in folklore. Her work with poultry outside the walls made her a commoner, but she brought her produce directly to the senior lady of the manor, since fowls were meat for nobility when the main diet of the lower classes was flesh of beasts killed and salted at the onset of winter. The henwife’s permit to enter or leave the great house when she chose made her inconvenient to the janitor or doorkeeper. A fifteenth-century Scottish poet (sometimes thought to be Dunbar) tells how his wife dies of thirst, goes to heaven, gets work as the Mother of God’s henwife, “holds Saint Peter at strife”, and finding the ale of heaven sour, works in a public house outside the walls for travellers on the way there. The likeness between this henwife and Wat Dryhope’s mother is a consequence of their profession.

… Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan.

The wooded character of this scene is recorded in the ancient ballad of the Outlaw Murray, which describes King James Stuart leading an army of full five thousand men against the border clans:

They saw the derke forest them before,

They thought it awesome for to see.

In the eighteenth century this ancient forest was destroyed by a system of housekeeping based upon sheep and the wool industry. Sir Walter Scott later celebrated the transparency of the loch but also its arboreal devastation:

Oft in my mind such thoughts awake

By lone Saint Mary’s silent lake.

Thou know’st it well — nor fen nor sedge

Pollute the pure lake’s crystal edge;

Abrupt and clear the mountains sink

At once upon the level brink;

And just a trace of silver sand

Marks where the water meets the land.

Far in the mirror, bright and blue

Each hill’s huge outline you may view;

Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,

Nor tree, nor bush, not brake is there,

Save where, of land, yon slender line

Bears thwart the lake the scattered pine.

By the end of the twentieth century overgrazing had destroyed the topsoil, exposing grey slides of rubble-like stone in places. The end of industrial housekeeping let Ettrick regain its ancient forest with the addition of fine gardens around the homesteads.

Page 30.

Large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet.

Like the trees on which it was modelled the powerplant lived and fruited by synthesizing sunlight, air, moisture and dirt, though the nature of the fruit was decided by human programming. Roof, walls and foundations of houses — all but the polished parquet floors — were extensions of the plant. Stalks easily reached cloud level since their tap root touched the geothermal layer.

The first modern powerplant was developed in the twenty-first century by a team of more Japanese geniuses than can be listed here. The world was then so disastrously polluted by competitive exploitation that the richest exploiters were acquiring shares in self-contained ecosystems (some on Earth, some on satellites) where they hoped their children would survive when human life became impossible elsewhere. The same greedy madness for more existence than they would allow others had driven American, British and Russian governors to build nuclear bomb bunkers in the twentieth century, Egyptian governors to build huge pyramids and burial chambers in the dawn of history.

The company who had developed the powerplant foresaw it could replace monetary housekeeping. They also knew it would cause panic in the bankers, stockbrokers and executives who then ruled the civilized world by manipulating money. (Note that civilized = citified.) Money was then the most beautiful and desirable of possessions and wars were fought against people who reduced its value: the Japanese therefore promoted their powerplant in secret, selling seedlings at huge prices to heads of governments and transnational businesses as a means by which the wealthy could get self-supporting private households. Millionaires saw that such households were safer than any others and began seeding them on privately owned islands off the shores of their native lands, but not all millionaires and heads of state acted selfishly. Without openly saying so the governments of Japan, Switzerland and Israel planted the roots of a powerplant economy which would eventually benefit their whole country. Soon after an Arab syndicate began secretly donating cuttings to Islamic nations everywhere. By then news of powerplant culture had spread to users of the open intelligence network, who saw it could be used to liberate everyone from want. Millionaires faced the fact that their private havens would only be perfectly safe in a world where most people were safe.